Natsuki IKEZAWA, novelist, poet, essayist, translator
of modern Greek poetry. Majored physics in Saitama University. Born on
July the 7th of 1945 (Hokkaido Japan) and regarded as one of the best
serious writers in Japan, is known for his love of islands, and lives
on one in the far south of the Japanese archipelago.
Since his debut as a novelist at the age of thirty-nine, the Pacific islands
have provided the setting for seven of his major works

His books:

Still Lives
» received
the Akutagawa award
» translation
in English and French
The Fall of Macias Guili
» received
the Tanizaki award
» translation
in German
Tio of the Southern Sea Island
» received
Shogakukan Juvenile Literature award
» translation
in French
His Bones Are Coral Made, Pearls That Were His Eyes
» received
Shogakukan Juvenile Literature award
» translation
in French and many others

"A
Burden of Flowers" is an intelligent, cosmopolitan novel set in the
exotic surroundings of Bali and alive with suspense, drug intrigue, courtroom
drama, and political tension.
The action centers on Asia-traveling Japanese artist "Tez" Nishijima and
his Europhile sister Kaoru. When Tez is arrested in Bali on charges of
heroin trafficking and faces the death penalty, his parents are paralyzed
with shame, leaving his Paris-based sister to come to the rescue. She
enlists the help of an old expert on Indonesia and two of his friends,
and (like Dorothy with the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow) sets
off to challenge a shadowy and, to her, very alien situation. Her brother,
languishing in jail, thinks back over his journeys in Thailand, Cambodia,
and Vietnam, to the two women (one sweet, one sinister) who changed his
life there, to his subsequent slow spiral into drug addiction and to the
day a police stooge planted a cigarette carton filled with heroin in his
room in the Kuta Beach backpack territory of Bali.
Tez's life hangs in the balance, tipped one way by the maneuverings of
a dangerous senior police officer, and the other way by the investigative
efforts of an undercover agent who, in a powerful climax, is shot and
left for dead.

"A Burden of Flowers" is both a Pan-Asian adventure that will appeal
to readers familiar with "The Beach", and a cutting-edge portrait
of the "New Asia" in which Japan (the long-lost, economically spoiled
child of the region) is still struggling to find itself.
"A Burden of Flowers" received a coveted literary award, the Mainichi
Prize, in 2000

One of his first works to be translated into English, "Still Life" part of a collection of four stories published by Kodansha International under the title "Still Lives", was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1987.

Hawai’i is still one of the favored destinations of Japanese tourists. To most Japanese, Hawai’i embodies the cliché of the eternal summer resort where they can communicate in Japanese. In this book, however, the author searches for the real Hawai’i behind the tourist façade: the natural landscape of the islands and the culture of the Hawai’ian people. The author spent two years traveling back and forth to Hawai’i, exploring its deep forests and volcanic craters. He met with entomologists and hula dancers, visited taro fields, and went surfing, And he was captivated by the richness of the Hawai’ian language.
An active novelist and resident of Okinawa who writes from an islander’s perspective, the author frequently compares Hawai’i to his Okinawan home, with which it has much in common. His attitude is frankly expressed by the bold use of the indigenous punctuation for the islands, “Hawai’i,” instead of the Japanese pronunciation, “Hawaii.” An excellent record of what the author gleaned during his travels, the volume is further enhanced by the lavish use of photographs and maps.

Photographer Hoshino Michio was attacked and killed by a grizzly bear on Kamchatka Peninsula on August 1996. This book brings together various writings and transcripts of speeches and dialogues by this author on Hoshino and his life. At twenty-two, Hoshino made up his mind to live in Alaska, and began studying photography as the means of achieving that goal. By the age of twenty-six, he was in Alaska, where he spent the next eighteen years exploring remote wilderness areas and taking superb photographs of the scenery and wildlife he found there. To the author, Hoshino was a rare person in that he demonstrated what true happiness was by the example of his own life In the “Somewhat Too-personal Commentary” he wrote for Hoshino’s book Tabi o suru ki [Traveling Trees], the author says, “Hoshino lived a better life and enjoyed more happiness than anyone I know of,” and suggests that “we are not qualified to mourn his death.”

It is the summer of 1968, and four spies are working to smuggle military secrets out of Kadena Air Base in Okinawa and disrupt the US bombing of North Vietnam. Chōei lost his parents and older brother in the World War II of Saipan; he now runs a parts shop in Okinawa. Frieda-Jane, a sergeant major, was born to an American father and a Philipine mother. Taka, a drummer in a rock band, was abandoned by his father for a life on the mainland and lost his mother to suicide. And the Vietnamese-born Annan is Chōei’s childhood friend from Saipan.The four have little in common aside form living in Okinawa, sharing neither age, nationality, ethnicity, nor language, and none has complete knowledge of everyone else involved. The only thing to connect them is their participation in a dangerous plan that leaves them nothing to gain, spurred on not by patriotism but by a sense of camaraderie and a desire to “follow their feelings” in coming to the aid of a Vietnamese girl. They are individuals playing at being heroes, they aver self-mockingly, rather than antiwar ideologues. But the story provides a rousing depiction of the characters’ pride in acting of their own accord, rather than marching to another’s tune.
During the writing of this novel the author was also editing a collection of world literature. The task made him realize anew that an “interest in post-colonialism and the frontier, an understanding of the female perspective, and a reliance on the power of his literary approach; indeed, these three elements are very much alive in this work. (SH)